


From one to another.

by Aroihkin



Category: World of Warcraft
Genre: Prompt Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-09-23
Updated: 2011-09-23
Packaged: 2017-10-23 23:29:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 899
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/256290
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aroihkin/pseuds/Aroihkin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Death Knight Kalenedral has words with a captive audience. Prompt response from the official forums.</p>
            </blockquote>





	From one to another.

**Author's Note:**

> Don't worry, Dragon Age folks. I'm trying to claw my way back to S&S! <3
> 
> This is from [this prompt](http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/3196391872) on the official forums. I obviously had to take an odd angle with it, considering my character is an amnesiac, but I think it worked out well enough.
> 
> **Prompt summary:** Write about one (or both) of your character's parents. Start with "I was born..."

"I was born... on the ground in a dark forest, with blood in my throat and ice in my veins," Kalenedral murmured, his quiet voice carrying eerily well over the splashing. "It was the ice, the unbelievable, unnatural, unending cold, that hit me first. It was like being dropped from a dead sleep into the ocean. First nothingness, then ice. I remember it clearly."

His audience was less than impressed, clawing furiously at Kalenedral's plate-encased arm and kicking its legs in sheer desperation. The struggle was oddly gratifying, and Kal pushed his arm down a little further, feeling the resistance and then dull _snap_ of a nose breaking against the bottom of the water trough.

"At first, lying there in the dirt, I knew nothing," he continued calmly, the softness of his voice playing sharp counterpoint to the tableau he presented, crouched over his struggling victim. A building burned slowly a ways away, and there were many corpses upon the ground. Not all of them wore red and white, but most of them did.

He took a firm grip on the skull in his hand and pulled, letting the panicked human have a few gasps of air, blood running freely down his soaked face. "M- _monster!_ The Light will--"

Kalenedral pushed his arm back down again, cutting off the crusader's speech. He continued, as though simply speaking to himself -- which he kind of was, really. The human certainly wasn't hearing much, busy slowly drowning as he was. "My mind was utterly empty, completely exposed. I recall frantically searching through it and finding nothing at all to grasp onto... words really cannot do the feeling justice. It was..." he mulled a choice of words over for a moment, "... _terrifying_. Did you know that my kind can feel that, scarlet? I would wager that you did not. Or if you did, you reveled in it."

His laugh echoed coldly over the crackle of flames and the splashing of the ice-cold water. Off in the distance, Limbface glanced up from his task of digging in the mud, but quickly resumed work when he saw that his master wasn't in need of aid.

"And then, _he_ was there. It still takes a great act of will to not refer to him as _He_ , you know. The Master, the Lich King. His presence was as pure as fire and just as painful to hold onto, but he was the only thing there in my empty mind... so hold I did." Giving this some thought, Kal shook his head slightly, "No, not hold. I _clung_ as though to debris in the center of that wide, dark ocean. Though it burned me, clinging to it did not let me drown, and in time the burning became an all-encompassing _need_ to serve him."

The human's struggles were weakening. Kalenedral dimly watched as his ghoul jumped down into the deepening hole he'd been digging with his large, razor-sharp claws. The former elf rarely waxed on to such a degree as he was doing here, but it was... acceptable here and now, where none would repeat the things he said.

"When I stood for the first time on legs that perhaps never had held weight before -- if they had, I don't recall -- I looked at the robed men and women around me, raised my chin, and told them to do what they would to me in His name--" the Knight caught himself with a sharp bark of wry laughter, "You see? There I go again. Although, I suppose when speaking of the Lich King back _then_ , the honorific still holds true, doesn't it? My mind, my bones, my very soul... they did not belong to me."

With a great heave, Kal hauled the human's head back up again, peering intently down at his face. "Tell me, does yours belong to _you_ , scarlet?"

He didn't expect a coherent response, of course. The human had hardly heard a word Kalenedral had said over all his futile struggling. Wounded and exhausted before Kal had even forced him into the trough, he was no match at all for the Death Knight's unholy strength. But he kept fighting anyway.

It was a trait Kalenedral had noted many times among the living.

"I have no memory of life, scarlet," Kal continued over the man's desperate gasps for air. He was so far gone at this point that he hadn't even resumed spewing his nonsense at the Knight. "Only of my dark rebirth and what came after. I am indeed a monster," he allowed, "there is little denying that. I enjoy your terror as surely as you enjoyed theirs."

He twisted the man's neck, aiming his face at the bodies on the ground that _weren't_ wearing red and white.

"You are alive, scarlet. At least for the moment," he noted aloud, leaning down close to the man's ear. "Living and breathing. Breathing and living. You have never had your own self stripped away from you. _You_ have never had Arthas in your mind. And you are just as monstrous as I. What, I wonder, is your excuse?"

The man took a breath, now to speak, face twisting in rage -- Kalenedral slammed his head against the edge of the trough hard enough to daze him, and then put him back under the water again.

"You have none," Kal said mildly.

He did not lift his head again.

**Author's Note:**

> ( Kal's also not normally the monologuing type, so I tried to make it more like his commentary on monsters and motives, rather than just an info-dump. )


End file.
